Link Dump Friday №201

Because this is now February, the month of love, I decided to begin this week's Link Dump Friday lineup with an examination of unconditional parental love, and how it can help us grow, or hinder us. And then I thought, "Man, that's all warm and fuzzy and junk. I don't want to alienate the manly men in the crowd. I'd better throw some zombies all up ins." And so I did, but then I remembered not everyone likes zombies, and besides certain scary alien games are really popular right now, so I added some aliens, and you can't have aliens without... well, let's just say this week's snuggle-bunny theme of wuv didn't quite follow all the way through.

A Mother in Festerwood - If you love something, set it free. Unless it's a baby and setting it free involves letting it toddle its fleshy, chubby self into a forest filled with angry bears, dragons, trolls, and... squiggly black thingies. Austin Breed brings you this interesting bit of interactive art, for lack of a more fitting genre, where you play as a mother trying to raise a child alone in a dangerous forest, where keeping your child safe becomes harder the older it gets, and may keep him from ever really growing up. Despite some frustrating A.I. and limited player interaction, it's a clever bit of symbolism. Somehow I doubt most governments would see sending your infant alone into a forest filled with fangs and hate and expecting them to kick some butt in quite so positive a light.

Aliens Kidnapped Betty - The title tells you all you need to know; Betty has been kidnapped... by aliens! It's a cute and silly little one-button game that starts out simple as you avoid the aliens and try to reach the exit on each level, but gradually adds more and more challenges. Though isn't this sort of thing a little... xenophobic? Why can't we have some species equality? Why not "Humans Kidnapped Hlurgh'tagh"? Look, all I'm saying is that if we want the interplanetary hatred to stop, we have to be willing to meet the aliens halfway!

The Sagittarian - [Note: Contains language and violence.]Hyptosis wants you to survive the zombie apocalypse, Choose Your Own adventure style! When the end of the world comes around in the form of shambling brain munchers, it's up to you to beat feet while stayin' alive. While not particularly challenging or deep, it features some great artwork and a nifty little bit of text adventuring. Anyone who seriously thinks antagonising an armed, morally bankrupt survivalist is a good idea is probably angling for a Darwin Award. (Also, watch for a cameo from a pair of mall rats.)

Fifty Two - Well, great. Way to go. If you stopped to read this description, you've already lost. You have a narrow window of time to successfully complete a series of short minigames, and a single mistake means you'll have to start all over again. "What's so bad about that?" you ask? "What's the worst that can happen?" Oh, I dunno, maybe the end of the world!... hey, don't come crying to me when we're all rendered into space dust because you didn't get the bug out of the way in time!

Intelligence: The New Enemy - This arenashooter game wants you to blast through legions of enemies, just like all the others. However, unlike all the others, the enemies you encounter gradually become "smarter" the farther you go, reacting to your attacks in different ways. It's fast, it's frantic, and it's got one of the most frustratingly slippery movement setups I've encountered since Luigi. I'll tell you one thing; this would not fly with Star Fox. (Although he did keep Slippy around, so maybe his standards aren't as high as one might hope.)

Aliens Kidnapped Betty is a great game, almost deserves a review of it's own.

For a 1-button game, the developer has really worked the mechanic well. The level design is excellent, just puzzling enough to keep you interested but not frustrated and if you collect all the coins it makes a bit more of a challenge. The music is a nice repeating riff that suits the style well.

Intelligence: The New Enemy is the best flash arena shooter I've seen in a while, arena shooters being one of my favorite genres. Too bad it ends, I didn't even get to max all my upgrades! Also at level 24 frame rate got really slow but I stuck it out and it fixed itself when the level was over. Ended up with 17th highest score of all time! Thanks again JIG!!!!!

Aliens Kidnapped Betty would probably be a half decent game, if it had been programmed properly. Half of the time, the game doesn't respond to pressing the key, resulting in having to basically mash it, and as for the blocks that crumble when you step OFF them, they instead crumble while you're walking on them.

I didn't find any issues with wthe controls in Aliens Kidnapped Betty. A couple of the level designs were a little annoying in that they either required a leap of faith or a proper guess as to which of two directions lead to a bonus coin and which was the exit, but the levels were short enough to restart without feeling too bad about it. The one I didn't like was Level 15

with the crumbling blocks that seemed to be crumbling just so the player couldn't experiment with the tricky-to-target has-to-be-in-the-center of the platform leap of faith.

Speed upgrades were a mixed blessing, but added some welcome challenge.

I also really liked the three bonus levels with different mechanics. They felt like something special and different, not just a harder level tacked to the end with the word "bonus" on it.

Anyone any idea how to beat the "escape the fly swatter" minigame in Fifty two? The other minigames are usually OK in difficulty, but i don't get that one - scene starts and I'm dead in about half a second... Literally...

As far as I can tell, heading to Union will eventually kill you. I've killed her as well as left her. You ALWAYS dies if you head to Union.

She mentions that there were 4 of them. Is that significant?

Badmouth to Sage and die. Stick with him and you live.

Go to the prison and the guards shoot you. Try the football stadium and live.

There are survivors:

A girl in Union

A tough guy names Sage off of St.Claire who leads you to a survivor camp.

The aforementioned survivor camp.

Guards at a prison.

And different types of zombies:

On the road to St.Claire, there is a super fast one feeding. No matter what you do, it kills you.

Help the woman's sick kid and guard the back...find a "runner." Don't know exactly what that was... Another runner climbs the fence of the school and kills you. Are they just super-fast zombies? The same as the one in the previous spoiler?

Let Sage kill the guy at the campground. You leave and find a "docile one...smoke coming out of its mouth." I backed away. Sage throws a stone and the think explodes, killing you.
Then I tried to kill it and died.

If you make it to the baseball stadium, there are "a couple of badass zombies hiding in the dugout." They're still in their uniforms and equipment. One has a bat, lol.

A Mother In Festerwood gives you so little control, you can barely even call it a game. It's kind of similar to training your creature in the Black and White games, but with far less ability to decide what happens to your kid.

I rage-quit Aliens Kidnapped Betty on level 7. He seems to only jump when he's walking, and there's not (well, not quite, I guess) enough time to let him start walking and then click the up button before he walks into a bomb or onto the spikes.

And (whine) further to the equality theme, when it said I was now going to rescue my wife, I wanted it to have been the husband that got kidnapped, and then I, Betty, would get to rescue Marmaduke.

Agreed that "Aliens Kidnapped Betty" should get it's own review. It's casual enough for people like me to finish it no problem (besides small frustrations in levels) and gamers looking for a challenge can go for all the coins. Works really well, besides the crumbling blocks going too fast and not letting you click sometimes. My favorite out of this batch!

I played A Mother in Festerwood on another site and it works fine.
Has anyone ever reached some sort of end for Festerwood? Nothing seems to give him his health back. The longest I got him to live is 26 years old :(

@Finn
Using a different site doesn't fix anything. The game is hosted on Newgrounds. Other sites use that. So if it is a problem with Newgrounds, no site will work with it until they host the game themselves.

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